Monday, June 21, 2010

A Comic Strip With Specific Expressions

Zoran, a frequent commenter posted some great Calvin and Hobbes strips awhile ago and I've been meaning to link to them.I stopped reading comics strips in the 1970s when amateur artists began dominating the papers, but now and then I would notice a small handful of strips that stood out as the last lights flickering in the dim twilight of post-hippie decline of western culture.One was "Shoe" by Jeff MacNellyand later I noticed Calvin and Hobbes.I don't know a lot about the strip or its creator, Bill Watterson, except that Calvin is obviously drawn really well. Zoran did this great post showing that he even uses lots of custom-tailored poses and expressions, rather than the simple cookie-cutter repeated frames that so many comic strip artists rely on. This is rare for comics strips in its whole history - let alone in the 80s or 90s.

54 comments:

I think you must have read my mind or something, John. When Cartoon Brew posted those boring Sunday Funnies, I commented saying that we need more Bill Watersons and Walt Kellys to kick the newspaper comics in the rear again, and then you come around and post something from one of his comics!

I'm just messing with you, but I really did say that over at Cartoon Brew, and yes, I love Calvin and Hobbes a lot myself. Garfield, Crappy, Dilbert (worst comic strip I've ever seen ever. I don't get why anyone would even read it) and its awful ilk couldn't hold a candle to that strip. Have you heard of Jeff Smith and his Bone comics? I don't really know too much about him, but I've seen some of his stuff. A very nice Walt Kelly feel, and really nicely inked.

Unlike animation, there are actually quite a few good artists left in the comic medium. You just gotta know where to look - I'm a big fan of Jhonen Vasquez, Roman Dirge, some of the folks at the Beano/Dandy, Jamie Hewlett and, of course, Bill Watterson.

Bill Watterson was a major influence on me in my youth. I used to copy his drawings and style all the time! I just loved it, and I still get references to this comic, since the main character and I share the same name... goes to show how influential this comic strip really was.

I was twelve years old when "Calvin and Hobbes" first appeared in the funny pages in my town. It had an amazing effect on all the children. We would gather in the library before class every day just to read Calvin. It was so stimulating, from both an artistic and humor standpoint, in contrast to "Cathy", "Garfield", "Mary Worth", etc.

Of course, the other 80's-90's strip that I'd be curious to hear your opinion of is Gary Larson's "The Far Side". While not nearly as complex as Calvin and Hobbes when it comes to character expression, I think his simplicity is deceptive when it considering overall design and layout (and love how his characters get more complex the further he goes down the evolutionary chain).

I also loved that it was a single panel strip made, pretty much, for science nerds.

Watterson left the field for many reasons. most of which are not unlike the reasons animation is almost a desolate playground these days. editors constantly fighting with him over jokes. the fact that the size of the comics were constantly shrinking, and the ever present corperate pressure to sell the whole damn thing out into coffee mugs, t shirts,calenders, pourly animated series. ect ect ect. which of course led to countless bootlegged car stickers of little calvin wizzing on anything that society needed wizzed on. Watterson fought fiercly for his own space every sunday for his huge beautifull strips that was twice the size of the other strips, yet half the size of some of the original sunday funnies. so he retired calvin and hobbes while it was still great. before the monsterous execs could ruin it. his art is SEVERLY missed.

oh man ive got about 5 Calvin and Hobbes treasuries in my room, my Dad got them all when i was a kid. I acted just like Calvin too when i was younger.

Mr. Kricfalusi, did you know he was a "rulebreaker" too? He decided that the sunday comic format was too restricting and fought with the papers and demanded that he decide on the panel sizes himself to further improve his storytelling. And even though many newspapers said that they'd drop Calvin and Hobbes if he started drawing the panels in a new format, he didnt mind, he wanted the artistic integrity. He never sold out for big money, either.Its all in the 10th anniversary book where he talks about everything to d with the strip.

He says his main influences were Pogo, Krazy Kat and Charles Schulz's Peanuts.

I brought a Calvin and Hobbes book into the preschool I work at to teach kids about different emotions. They made me sit down and go through the entire book with them! You know something is drawn well when people who can't read yet love it...

Thanks for the memories. For the last several post-Watterson years my approach to newspaper comics has been this:

1. About once every couple of months I'll remember to open up to the comics page

2.I see two columns of rectangles in which very, very tiny images have been placed.

3. It takes a few seconds for me to focus on the page enough to discern differences between the contents of the tiny rectangles.

4. I see [A] old strips that should have died years ago; [B] new strips that should never have been born; [C] strips that exist solely to exploit the corpses of vastly superior, now-retired strips; [D] occasionally amusing punchlines written above boring art; [E] occasionally good art supporting tedious writing.

5. I wonder if it's always been like this. Did I simply uncritically like crap when I was younger? Oh, most definitely. Have I just gotten old and cranky? Yes. Is there a good strip somewhere on the page? Maybe. But it's going to be so small that it must necessarily suffer by comparison to what I got used to with The Far Side and Calvin & Hobbes.

6. I bemoan the fact that I have now last several minutes of my life in a pointless search for second-best entertainment.

I close the paper, embarrassed for having opened it up to the comics page and hope nobody saw me doing it.

You rarely get anything particularly fun these days. Strips often go with stiff characters, copypasted expressions, and jokes that your ancestors found boring. There are some happy exceptions, such as Cul de Sac.

Watterson is a great influence in me too. But he probably took the right decision by leaving the strip. It's certainly better to leave it while it's still good than continuing it doing a half-ass job. Maybe he had enough talent to keep at it a few more years, but if he was tired that could have been noticed in his work.

I think Garfield was a good strip once, but now it's very mechanical and reiterative. It still has decent drawings, but it shows very little effort in the stories and set ups.

I would like to see Watterson doing another comic, maybe with other characters, once in a while, but it seems he decided to retire completely.

I hearing this for the first time in 2001 and even if the drawing style don't inspire me so much, it being a very funny comic with at least more sincere characters than what i seen in a overatted comic as Garfield. It's a shame that Bill Watterson left the medium in his time of glory but i guess he learning the hard way.

He surely influenced by many old comics because we seen the source of his influences.

I liked how Watterson, was able to change the structure of his sunday strips, during his last few years. He broke out of the bland rectangle shape. Each sunday strip was like a big drawing,instead of just a readable comic strip.

Thankfully, Bill Watterson was able to maintain control over his creations as well, so after retiring from it the syndicate couldn't slot in a poor imitaion. He also wouldn't allow any merchandising (He could have cleaned up, though. Gotta admire the integrity to just say no to big money). To this day, if you ever see a t-shirt or bumper sticker using Calvin & Hobbes, you'll know it's an unofficial knock-off.

There's plenty of hope for comics stuck waiting in the wings, but the sydicates don't want them. Just another business that isn't concerned with talented artists.

My brother had to resort to self-publishing his "Patty Cake" comic, which was partly inspired by things like Calvin, Walt Kelly, and Ren & Stimpy. It was picked up by a small comics publisher, but eventually dropped poor sales (in reality it was poor marketing.

For every inept waste of space strip and comic that's actualy running in the papers or shops, there's several well done, entertaining ones that can't catch a break.

Struggling against the way these businesses are run is enough to make you so bitter a lemon would be like a ball of sugar by comparison.

Watterson was an excellent artist in about every aspect, and the newspapers he published in hated him for it. His work technically fit size limitations but couldn't be cut and cropped to fit a newspaper page however editors wanted. He fought very hard to be allowed to draw *compositions* for sunday strips, not just 8 same size panels (2 of those 8 having to be 'throw away' panels that many papers wouldn't even publish).

Newspapers can blame the internet all they like, but when you fight that hard against having something *fun* in your publication, maybe there's a reason no one likes subscribing to them anymore.

It's a shame because you're right, I don't think I have seen anything that masterful done since.

J.C., it's a coincidence because i seen a Calvin look cap this afternoon. I'm glad that you mentionned this because i will never do, mostly because i having rarely the occasion to read Watterson's comic.

WOW! Thanks for the post and recognition, John! I dig your choices - the chewing bit is some of the funniest drawing I've ever seen in my life.

Watterson was gifted at so many things, but many of them were common enough among recognizably good artists that they needn't be pointed out at every turn....the exceptions, just as with your own work, were:

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

SPECIFIC ACTING

and

UNBELIEVABLY, AWE-INSPIRINGLY SEDITIOUS HUMOUR

C&H lays to waste so much of the modern world it's hard to believe someone got away with it in ANY medium. The pretty facade of Calvin's "whimsical imagination" -as people who think cartoons are for babies like to call it- is a world of delusion, decadence and unchecked egomania that is slowly but surely digesting itself, with morality and humanity and wit the rays of sunshine penetrating it, giving us all hope that Calvin, and ourselves, might be more than just complex assholes on a tiny floating ball of dirt in the infinite blackness.

No single thing has made me more cynical OR hopeful than Calvin and Hobbes. As a natural optimist, I found balance in it - it fixed me. 'Cause goshdamnit, you have to be at least CAPABLE of thinking human being are idiots. (See the "man cartoonist" post for more on that....)

Oh! By the way, in case anyone is wondering.......I'm keeping my head down right now. Not gunna parade my wares around until I'm ACTUALLY Hot Sh*t at drawing. No sketchbook pages, nothing - wait 'til we can laugh at those. Deeply sorry you folks can't see my sophomoric dalliances with real craftsmanship - you don't know what you're missing, really! God bless this blog, obviously....

P.S. - I'm sorry for the small images too. They were the best I could find.

I love comic strips and still keep up with them, for the most part. Calvin and Hobbs was great, but I think Garfield is the best one. I've been a big Jim Davis fan for a while, and his drawings are very well constructed, very funny, very well composed, and when he wants to, he can get very specific and funny expressions. And he has a very all encompasing and recognizable style. You can tell a Jim Davis drawing without any doubt.

I guess he does like to "repeat" panels in strips (although they are always new drawings), but for my money he's the best comic strip artist in main stream papers. Garfield, imo, was best in the early to mid 90s, but its still a great strip, with very solid drawings. There are never any "sloppy" panels in a Garfield strip.

You're aware that Jim Davis doesn't actually draw Garfield anymore, right? He has a whole team of artists that do that for him. He does have his name written on them though, kinda like Matt Groening has his name contractually etched onto anything from the Simpsons or Futurama. But from what I understand he hasn't actually drawn the strip for many, many years.

That said, though the humor is bland, recycled and tedious, Garfield can occasionally have funny drawings in it. Though I'd agree with Guybrush that that site Garfield Minus Garfield makes the comic strip 100 times funnier when they Photoshop Garfield out of the strip.

The Europpean comics industry losed appeals in the mid-1970's, it's well know. French-Canadians cartoonists as Serge Gaboury becomes gold in the 1980's by the cult Croc magazine when it's the most politically incorrect magazine i have luck to read. I having issues of it as a kid but i just recycling only two editions made before they discontinued for good.

And then, you have Bill Watterson who created perhaps the last good valuable comic ever. It's a sign that Europpean never learned from their own mistakes these days.

Because now Europpean comics is made for sealed junk products with characters as Lou and Kid Paddle. Comics made before 1965 was made by real peoples who turns their characters as real. Now they look made by fictious peoples who never understand how world works.

Lou is a very popular comic series in Europe but who don't show appeals because of the amateur art style, fear and conservatism that this and the others modern comics occured today, besides it's not very honnest.

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And now, one of the most popular comics characters ever is re-branded as a Flat cartoon style who make smile the crew behind Fairly Oddparents and Family Guy:

Well, thats not how I understand it. Where are you getting that info? According to Jim Davis himself, in a very recent video, he explains that yes, he does draw every panel of a Garfield strip. He has "clean-up" artists who finalize the line and ink them, but it all starts from his drawings, every single strip, even to this day.